MNAF. Museo Nazionale Alinari della Fotografia

The Alinari National Museum of Photography presents the complete retrospective of Carlo Mollino photographic work. A protagonist of design, architecture and photography of the XXth century, Mollino is also the most appreciated author of the last century on the market: one of his pieces of forniture, a table realized in 1948, has been knocked down for 3.800.000 dollars.

Mollino’s work always consists in “unique pieces”, whether he created pieces of fornitures or phtographs. The elitist architect had never produced editions of his photographs and he signed less than 40 photographs, unique copies often retouched.

The exhibition is organized by Fratelli Alinari. Fondazione per la Storia della Fotografia and Museo Casa Mollino. The selection of the photographs is edited by Fulvio and Napoleone Ferrari, founders of the Museo Casa Mollino. They have studied the life and work of Carlo Mollino and realized several international exhibitions and publications.


Through 140 photographs from 1936 to 1973 and some drawings and related historical objects, the exhibition reveals the “photographic worlds” of Mollino: architecture, ski and the important corpus of women’s portraits, realized in three different periods: the years before the Second World War, the 1950s and the Polaroids of the 1960s/1970s.
Since the 1930s Mollino has focused his attention on the real sense of photography and its specificity, so different from the specificity of painting. The issue was open in those years and Mollino handled and worked it out in his critical essay “Il Messaggio dalla Camera Oscura” (“Message from the Darkroom”, English Edition 2006), published in 1949 with a rich iconographic apparatus of over 300 images by himself and other 142 international photographers.


Mollino, professor at the Politecnico of Turin, founded a photographic laboratory at the Faculty of Architecture. He considered photography as an opportunity to work again on his buildings enhancing with every possible technical and literary artifice the authentic spirit of his interiors and buildings.
The real subject of his photographs seems to be exclusively constitued by women’s portraits, apart from some exceptions in the 1930s and 1940s, and the “hiding place” for their realization is specifically “molliniano” (Mollino lived at night, he threw off his traces, he didn’t answer the telephone).


We know that in his photographic work he didn’t simply portray his models, but he left us a Message from his Darkroom: a woman made up with lots of faces, bodies and expressions. It’s a photographic woman, the authentic love of Mollino.

Opening hours

From Monday to Sunday: from 10:00 to 19:00
Wednesday: closed

Price

General: 6.00 €
Reduced: 5.00 €
Children: 4.00 €